How to Master the Business Lunch

[12:30 p.m. The room is full of Manhattan's business elite, as usual. Feinberg is seated near the window. He looks around the famous wood-paneled room. The ceiling seems a thousand feet high. The servers move swiftly. The attire is business — all business. A plate of raw vegetables, on ice, is placed before him.]

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Venue is 90 percent. It's existential. People don't understand. "What difference does it make where we meet as long as the parties are there?" It makes a huge difference. Huge difference.

Now, obviously, you gotta deal with some basic questions: Who's doing the inviting? If I get a call from a CEO and he invites me to lunch, the question is, Where? He may say, "Let's go to the Four Seasons." He's saying, I want to chat with you in a surrounding conducive to credibility, authority, respect.

[The water glasses are refilled, and menus are placed on the table. Feinberg glances at his for four seconds, tops.]

That doesn't usually happen — with me, anyway. Usually the individual doesn't want to be seen eating with Ken Feinberg, problem solver, fixer. "Uh-oh, why was that guy eating with Feinberg?" So very often the suggestion will be "Let's meet at the 3 Guys diner on 75th and Madison." Or Monte's Italian dive in the Village. Let's meet where we won't be interrupted, and people won't be looking, and you can be candid.

[Bread. Butter.]

I will always agree to the venue — with one exception. I discourage executives or lawyers from having lunch at corporate headquarters or at the law firm. Two antiseptic. Too official. Too many diversions. Phones ring. Secretaries walk in. It's not so much a matter of neutral ground. I don't worry about that. It's more, Are we really going to be able to have a concentrated, hour-and-a-half intimate conversation? The reason the person wants to have lunch with me: How do we get to yes? That's the way I put it. How do we get to yes?

[The waiter arrives.]

Waiter: What would you like for lunch, sir? We also have a special soft-shell crab, if you like.

Shad roe for me.

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Waiter: Actually, sir, I'm sorry. It's very popular, and it's sold out today.

All right, then let me have the Dover sole. Water for me.

[The waiter leaves. Feinberg salts a vegetable.]

You can laugh, but watch what people order. They don't order anything that's gonna distract them from the real purpose. You don't want to order spaghetti or shellfish when you're gonna be working. Bouillabaisse — forget it! Let me have a piece of fish or a piece of veal or a salad. And if it's a salad, can they toss it in the kitchen? Done.

Booze: No. They want to order one? Go ahead. Not me.

There are three types of power lunches. One: getting to yes. You would never come here for that. I love the Four Seasons. But in 35 years I've never been invited to the Four Seasons for a power lunch designed to get to yes. Two: the social luncheon. "We haven't seen each other in a while. Let's go to the Four Seasons." There's still probably an agenda, but not one that troubles the CEO that there will be any downside risk to being seen. If anything, they may want to be seen. And then the third type of power lunch is there's absolutely no agenda. Just, "Let's exchange war stories, and the Four Seasons is fun; it's convenient."

A lunch that's the first kind — getting to yes — can break up an e-mail and phone- call impasse. "We started like this. [He puts his hands far apart.] We're 82 1/2 percent of the way to getting it done. [Brings hands closer together.] It's this last 17 1/2 percent. Let's have lunch and, at the end of the lunch, shake hands."

Say everybody knows the agenda: You want to get them to say yes. "Look—"

[The food arrives.]

Waiter: This is a caper-lemon sauce.

On the side, please. "Look" — perfect, thank you — "Look, I didn't invite you here to say yes, because I know you won't say yes. But can you go from here [puts hand on table in front of him] to here [slides hand to the edge of the table]? Because if you'll give me not the last 17 1/2 percent but half of that, I can go back to the other side and have a lunch with them and get them to say yes."

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You never, ever believe that there is a line in the sand beyond which anybody will not go. They wouldn't be there having lunch!

Let's say you want to get down to business, but the guy you're with is having a great time, yakking away. Fine. Let him go. But if we started at 12:30, it's now ten of two, and we're having coffee and dessert, now what? In the last ten minutes, something like this: "Well, you may like Derek Jeter, but I think he's over the hill. Now, let me tell you why I asked you here." Usually he'll go, "Yeah, okay. What's up?" Because he knows, sooner or later, Ken didn't come here to talk about the Yankees.

There is the issue of what to order and how much. Let's say you're the CEO and you invited me. The waiter comes over to me first. "What would you like?" I'd say to you, "You picked the place. What's good?"

[The waiter removes the plates.]

The question of who pays is very simple: Who invited who?

I'll tell you about a big lunch I had.

[Dessert menus appear.]

Oh, not for me. Black coffee, please.

BP. Tom Milch represents BP. He's with Arnold & Porter in Washington — chairman of the firm. Great guy. I call him up — "Tom. Let's go out to lunch. At Tosca." An Italian restaurant right in the Arnold & Porter building. "Everybody knows you represent BP, and everybody knows I'm the BP administrator, so there's not a big deal. Let's go to Tosca." "Well, I'm very busy." "Let's go." "All right, but we gotta make it quick."

And then at Tosca: "Tom. Here's why I'm here. The claims program BP is funding — I'm about to announce that anybody who suffered damage as a result of the spill can come into the claims program, and if they can prove their damage was caused by the spill, I will give them an emergency check with no obligation. They don't have to sign a promise not to sue, they don't have to promise they won't come back again for more money."

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"You've gotta be out of your mind! They're gonna take that money, go hire a lawyer, and sue us!"

"Trust me. Let 'em come in and get familiar with the program. They won't sue; they'll take the check, they'll spend it, and then they'll come back for another payment — when they will give me a release saying they can't sue."

"Aw, I hope you know what you're doing. This could cost — how much?"

"Well, I think if we do this right, over a 90-day period, it will cost probably about two and a half billion dollars."

Another glass of wine. "What?! You're gonna have to come down to Houston. You're gonna have to explain this to my board. They'll never go—"

I went down to Houston.

They went along. Of 169,000 people who took the emergency money, 160,000 came back and signed away their right to sue. I closed out the litigation. They now say, "Genius. A stroke of genius." It would have never worked if I had just flown down. I sat with Milch at Tosca, just the two of us.

I think I ordered the fish. Because you don't want to be slurping around.

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